Messages

1

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Any idea?

« on: May 13, 2026, 01:51:29 PM »

It saves to the Wii Mode memory, which you can access through the Wii mode memory management. Transfer it to an SD card and I think it should be accessible on another Wii?

Why am I replying to this? It seems like a legitimate enough inquiry.

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TalkBack / Re: Nintendo Announces Switch 2 Star Fox Reboot In Emergency Star Fox Direct

« on: May 08, 2026, 04:18:36 PM »

@Adrock

Editing long posts on a phone is annoying, so I just wanted to address one thing you said, which was about the game being $50 digital.

It's also $50 physical right now from Walmart or Amazon, if you didn't already know. For now, Walmart is matching the eShop and Amazon is matching them. And not only on this game, but Splatoon Raiders and Yoshi as well.

And yes, the industry needs more AA games, and I'm not sure people would be disappointed if this was a *new* Star Fox game at a lower budget and price point. The issue is that this is the 3rd remake for SF 64 and 4 overall when you include the original SNES game.

I'm sure the game will be fun as ever, but...really? We can't even get new levels like remakes of SNES SF stages that didn't make the jump to N64 like the Armada Stage?

Seriously, how are we this many Star Fox games in and the SNES of all things still has one of the wildest SF stages?

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TalkBack / Re: Nintendo Announces Switch 2 Price Increase Beginning September 1

« on: May 08, 2026, 08:27:13 AM »

I love living in a world where like 3 people with alot of power, money, and influence, can make incredibly boneheaded decisions that jack up the prices of things like oil and silicon and nobody can or seems to have any interest in having them suffer any kind of consequences for actions that effect billions of people.

I don't think you can blame those people this time, though. This has "the AI gold rush ate all the chips" written all over it. Sony raised the PS5 prices recently for that same reason.

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TalkBack / Re: Nintendo Announces Switch 2 Price Increase Beginning September 1

« on: May 08, 2026, 06:23:18 AM »

This generation is so weird. It's the first one ever where the devices got MORE expensive over time instead of less.

Figured this would end up happening when I bought my S2 last year. Glad I pulled the trigger when I did.

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TalkBack / Re: Nintendo Announces Switch 2 Star Fox Reboot In Emergency Star Fox Direct

« on: May 07, 2026, 07:50:24 PM »

Though that's an interesting idea that Nintendo may have rushed this after putting Fox in the Mario movie.  If the goal was to get something out quick, a remake of the most popular game in the series makes tons of sense.

Bear in mind that animated movies take years to make, even for a soul-less creativity-bereft corporate machine like Illumination. Fox was inserted into the Galaxy movie for the explicit purpose of selling a product, just like the rest of that movie. The fact that they announced this game just a month before it was scheduled to come out tells me they've been sitting on a completed game for a while now, just as we heard was the case with Metroid Prime Remastered (and have continued to hear is the case with Primes 2 & 3 on Switch).

On a side note, I don't understand why they went the generic "Unreal Engine 5" approach to the game's visuals. Seeing what Fox's part of the Galaxy movie looks like, ans 80s cel shaded graphic style like Hi-Fi Rush would have definitely gone over better.

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TalkBack / Re: Nintendo Announces Switch 2 Star Fox Reboot In Emergency Star Fox Direct

« on: May 07, 2026, 07:38:02 AM »

Everyone needs to stop lumping Zero in with 64. Those stages are designed and played COMPLETELY differently. Honestly the stage layout in Zero is better than 64 in some cases. Star Fox Zero was an entirely new game with a similar narrative. The vast majority of you couldn't deal with the Gamepad so here we are again. Same goes for Star Fox SNES, that is not Star Fox 64 in the slightest. Similar story(if you could even call it that) with planets going by the same name. Everything else is completely different.

Haven't played many remakes in the last decade, have you? The modern Resident Evil 3 is designed and played completely different from the original PlayStation RE3, with completely different levels and mechanics.

But it's still unquestionably a remake. It's telling the same story with the same characters.

We have the entire concept of a "reimagining" to cover games that divert so drastically from their original that they're practically new games. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a complete overhaul of the original Silent Hill to fit an Adventure Game mold.

But they're still remakes.

It's been 10 years since Nintendo had a bad developer release a bad Star Fox game on a bad console sporting a bad controller with a bad mandate to force players to accept a bad gimmick. You don't have to run defense for it anymore. 

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TalkBack / Re: Nintendo Announces Switch 2 Star Fox Reboot In Emergency Star Fox Direct

« on: May 06, 2026, 06:45:14 PM »

*sigh* You know...the game will probably be fine, but this announcement was fucking lame.

After all these years, we're doing YET ANOTHER remake of Star Fox 64, and mind you...Star Fox 64 was ITSELF a remake, so this is now the FOURTH time Nintendo's remade this game. Hell, considering that Star Fox Adventures also recycles the final boss from 64, I'd say we're up to at least 4.1 times that game's been remade now.

Really? That's really the extent of your fucking imagination, Nintendo? Yeah, screw putting forward any creative ideas and pushing the story forward. Let's just make a cheap and lazy tie-in product for another franchise's movie.

I'd say I expected better of you, Nintendo, but I can't say that I did considering how monumentally Nintendo's screwed up this franchise over the years.

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 28, 2026, 06:37:24 PM »

Happy birthday, broodwars! It’s been fun following your April odyssey, and not just because we’re two of the handful of people who still post here.

Thanks. I try to participate in these things when I can, though I thought we'd see a few more of the regulars this month.

Gonna play Saros when it arrives in a few days, but I did manage to clear the first 3 main areas of Pragmata. Quite an enjoyable game that's doing a good job of keeping combat interesting by continually introducing combat scenarios; new enemies; new weapons; and new mods, which is always a challenge with shooters. RE Requiem certainly failed that challenge with its spectacularly boring 2nd half. That said, even by the end of the 3rd area the game's already starting to re-use a few early game enemies with a bit more armor/power and a new name. Can't say I love that, but it hasn't gotten egregious yet. So far, it's the best game that truly came out this year that I've played (a stipulation I have to make since Rogue Prince of Persia technically came out last year, despite getting a physical release this year).

Been running into intermittent technical issues with the game on PS5, from Diana's hair sometimes rendering in a substantially more "fake"-looking way (where it looks kinda gray; sparse; and shimmery) in the shelter to sometimes sound effects getting muted altogether until I close the game and reload it.

Oh yeah, and I'm up to Chapter 5 in Fire Emblem: Engage. Yep, I can definitely see where people are coming from when they say that the hero worship of the main character is extremely obnoxious.

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 25, 2026, 06:01:13 PM »

Well, might as well talk about Wild ARMS 4 now that I'm pretty far in, past the part where I originally had to stop playing this PS2 game on the PS3 due to all the crashes.

The Wild ARMS games are a series of Western (as in "Old West") RPGs, but Wild ARMS 4 is an odd one that tried to shake up the formula by being post-apocalyptic, taking place 10 years after a global war that ravaged the planet. You play as Jude, a kid who's world is literally shattered when an army smashes through the invisible dome protecting his village in search of an ancient weapon: the ARM (a laser gun), which it turns out he's compatible with. Fleeing the destruction of his village with a rescued girl, he teams up with a pair of mercenaries to try to find out why this military splinter group is trying to revive the war and stop it.

So, all in all, pretty standard issue JRPG so far.

Where Wild ARMS 4 really shook things up for the series was in the battle system, throwing out the then-typical 3 person Dragon Quest-style combat and replacing it with a grid of 7 Hex-shaped positions on a circular board. When the battle starts, your 4 person party and the enemy are semi-randomly placed across the board. 3 of those Hex-spaces have elemental affinity, which affects the spells available to your casters and the damage received from elemental attacks. Player characters and enemies cannot enter each other's hexes, but multiple player characters and multiple enemies can occupy the same hex.

There is exactly 1 reason to ever have characters in the same hex, and that's that any item used on that hex affects everyone, like healing berries. But in general, you should avoid this at all costs, and the game WILL try to bait you at times into forgetting to spread your forces out by starting boss fights with everyone in the same hex. Attacking a hex attacks EVERYONE in the hex, so it's real easy way to get party wiped.

The difficulty balancing of this game is...erratic. Characters don't gain XP at the same rate. Once battle starts, every character starts with an XP multiplier of 1.0, with bonuses that kick in depending on actions during battle. Dodge an attack? +.1 to the XP multiplier of that specific character. Kill an enemy? +.2 or .7 depending on how many enemies. This severely disadvantages Yulie, who will never get XP bonuses of any kind since she's a primarily a healer and there's no bonus for healing. This severely advantages Racquel, a character who's just completely broken since she can move AND attack very hard in the same turn very early in the game. It's also easy for Arnaud or Jude to rack up multiple kills since they have ranged attacks that can hit multiple enemies and multiple hexes at once. You have to work to level up Yulie, and considering she's the healer you know she also has absolutely no HP once enemies start going after her.

And bosses will absolutely kick your teeth in if you don't make the right moves very early on in the fight.

On the flipside, battles go by pretty quickly, and you fully regain health for all party members after every battle. You don't regain MP, so segments of the game meant to be battles of attrition can get very hairy, but for the most part things are pretty breezy. While the game has random encounters, you can usually fulfill certain conditions to turn off them at nearby save points if you really want to. I don't recommend it since you need the XP, but hey...you CAN do it. And while death can come easily and swiftly, you also always have a quick retry option. These features were not common at all back at the time this game came out.

On a strange note, the game has a large emphasis on time-based 2D platforming to break up the RPG combat, and it's not very good in general. Jumping into or towards the screen feels very awkward, and there's a certain slippery nature to movement and jumping that can send you to the nearest bottomless pit extremely easily, requiring you to restart the section. And you are meant to play these sections somewhat recklessly, as there is a slow motion mechanic you can trigger that also makes invisible currency pickups appear in the air you can combo together. It's an interesting experiment, but I'm glad they ditched it for Wild Arms 5.

Equally strange is the game's character growth system. Like most RPGs, you unlock skills for each character as they level-up, but where Wild Arms 4 differs is that it also awards a set of re-usable skill points to each character at the player's discretion. All skills will eventually unlock on their own as you level, but you can use these bonus points to unlock later skills earlier without any hard commitments since you can reallocate the bonus points at any time and you get them back when the skill unlocks at its intended time. I get the impression this system is more important in the late game than the early to mid game, as you get more bonus points as you level and skills start to spread further apart.

So far, Wild ARMS 4 is a good RPG with a decent setup and a creative combat system with some surprisingly forward-thinking quality of life features, but generally poor production values (the insides of houses strictly speaking don't exist, as trying to enter one will just bring up a static NPC conversation image). I'm interested in seeing where the game goes now that I can finally play it properly, but the game I'm really hoping to see soon is Wild ARMS 5.

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 24, 2026, 04:21:03 PM »

This week I beat Tron: Evolution on PlayStation 3. This was my first PS3 game making use of the Move controllers. While I have those from PSVR I did need to pick up a PlayStation Eye camera to make them compatible. These are pretty cheap online, even brand new. The game also includes stereoscopic 3D support which is decent for games from that platform. Not knowing much about the game, I was expecting to be throwing discs with my move controllers, but the motion controls are only for steering the light cycle (same as the Wii version). The game is mostly a beat 'em up with some 3D platforming connecting the battles. The story was decent and serves as a prequel to the second film. I was surprised to see Bruce Boxleitner and Olivia Wilde reprising their roles in the voice acting. The game only takes about 5-10 hours to beat, though without the online trophies the Platinum is no longer available.

Weird. I owned this game back in the day. A co-worker gave it to me after he got tired of it, much like his copy of that Terminator game from around that time that was a 3 hour Platinum. I don't remember it being a Move game (and I do have a Move & Camera), but I do remember it being a surprisingly decent game based on an underrated movie.

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 24, 2026, 04:14:36 PM »

I've rolled credits on Astral Chain.

That final boss is fucking awful.

I mean...really? It has high health, high damage, high combo ability, the ability to teleport at will, and the ability to split into multiple copies & attack you from behind WHILE teleporting? Like the entire 2nd half of the game, it's just not fun to play.

Oh, and you have a heavy dose of the game's awful platforming before you even fight it.

It doesn't even look cool to fight, as it just looks like every other copied & pasted humanoid chimera in the game.

Good riddance to this game. Yes, I know there's a bunch of sidequests you can do in the epilogue post-game chapter. I don't care.

I was really hoping you were going to like Astral Chain. I don't remember the final boss being such a pain. I still have some of those epilogue quests to take care of.

I don't...dislike...Astral Chain. I'm mostly fed up with how bored I was playing it by the end. My issue with it is that it's a 30 hour game with enough ideas for a solid 8-10 hour game. The 1st half has pretty good pacing to it, but the 2nd half is just a bloated, awful mess. Just endless recycling of the same environments & the same enemies with new names. It's still probably my favorite Platinum Games product, but I don't like that studio's output in general. IMO, Platinum is a 1 trick Pony, and by Bayonetta 2 every other company making action games was doing that trick as well as improving on the rest of the experience. Platinum never grew as a developer. Even their "best" game, Nier Automata, mostly benefitted from only people like me ever playing the original Nier, or they'd have realized how little new Automata did.

Tried playing Fire Emblem Engage on my Switch 2 over lunch. That game runs pretty badly in handheld mode, with sound constantly dropping and desyncing.

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 22, 2026, 08:29:42 PM »

I've rolled credits on Astral Chain.

That final boss is fucking awful.

I mean...really? It has high health, high damage, high combo ability, the ability to teleport at will, and the ability to split into multiple copies & attack you from behind WHILE teleporting? Like the entire 2nd half of the game, it's just not fun to play.

Oh, and you have a heavy dose of the game's awful platforming before you even fight it.

It doesn't even look cool to fight, as it just looks like every other copied & pasted humanoid chimera in the game.

Good riddance to this game. Yes, I know there's a bunch of sidequests you can do in the epilogue post-game chapter. I don't care.

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 21, 2026, 11:15:26 PM »

I've enjoyed my time with Pragmata so far, but if I don't get Astral Chain done now I'm never going to. That game is such a goddamn slog. Finally on the last chapter, btw. Never underestimate Platinum's ability to repaint the same monster designs and give them new names with slightly different stats.

Wild Arms 4 also takes priority because that game's been one of my gaming white whales since back on the PS3, where I owned the PS2 copies of both it and Wild Arms 5, and both of them were one of the few games to not work on any PS3 after the original model. You spun up either of them, and you were rolling the dice every 30 seconds. The game would hard crash your console at any time, which was especially frustrating since I was really enjoying what I was able to play of those 2 games. But it's pretty much impossible to make any progress in a turn-based JRPG reliant on save points that can crash at any time.

The PS4/5 port of Wild Arms 4 looks quite lovely...so long as it's not in a cutscene. The in-game models are very crisp and look great, but the cutscenes all appear to have been recorded videos using the in-game assets, and they just look terrible. No helping that, I'm afraid. Still, SOMEONE at Sony had to care about this game to jump through all the legal hoops with XSEED to get it up on PSN after they basically said "no" years ago. Hopefully, that same person is also getting Wild Arms 5 in there.

The world needs the return of the Black Fenrir (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsNdqOpVo-M) and the Genocide Circus (https://youtu.be/zxql5apis3Y?t=194).

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TalkBack / Re: Splatoon Raiders Arrive July 23

« on: April 21, 2026, 05:47:50 PM »

I would be interested in a SP-only Splatoon game...but it's kind of unclear from the release date trailer what this game even is. What they showed look like Salmon Run with treasures and crafting, and that's not super appealing to me. I'd need to see more gameplay.

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 21, 2026, 12:40:11 PM »

Well, the plan was to play Pragmata (great game, btw) until Saros came out, but it appears we have a New Challenger for the rest of the month:

Oh how I have been waiting for this one. This one's been vexing me for 20 years, it and the game that came after it. Both PS2 games. Completely incompatible with the PS3 backwards compatibility. XSEED told everyone to forget those games ever getting re-released again. Vengeance shall be mine.   

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 18, 2026, 11:14:48 PM »

I have rolled credits on the Rogue Prince of Persia after lucking into a damn good run, where I got situationally the best weapon in the game early, plus the medallions needed to make it always Crit.

I proceeded to absolutely annihilate all 4 of the run's bosses, including netting me 3 most of the no-hit boss trophies I was missing (I already had the no-hit from the 4th boss). I'm not just missing 1 of those. I also got the trophy for no-hitting one of the trap-ladden levels.

Didn't think I was going to go for the Platinum on this one, but the game's a lot of fun and the Platinum's surprisingly do-able for a rogue-like.

As for the story, it's pretty standard issue Prince of Persia, right down to the ending being kind of lame, really.

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 17, 2026, 01:13:30 PM »

Completed my time with the Switch version of Yooka-Laylee & the Impossible Lair, getting all the Coins, Tonics, and Bees you can get without clearing the lair hit-less.

That sounds like the level of completion I had. What do you get for clearing the impossible lair without getting hit?

The game's final tonic, which makes the duo Gold.

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 16, 2026, 08:51:48 PM »

Completed my time with the Switch version of Yooka-Laylee & the Impossible Lair, getting all the Coins, Tonics, and Bees you can get without clearing the lair hit-less.

Still quite like that game, though I feel like it starts running out of ideas for areas about 3/4 of the way through. I definitely enjoyed the earlier levels more. And the lair itself is as miserable as I remembered.

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 16, 2026, 02:08:38 AM »

OK, finally had my 1st 2 successful runs through the Rogue Prince of Persia, as well as moved the story forward by rescuing my next family member.

Wow, that final boss was surprisingly easy, even as a 2-phase fight.

You unlock permanent items that make the game harder if you wish to use them (with the trade-off being that you acquire more upgrade currency), but I don't think I'll ever use them. I never see the point in these masochist challenge Debuffs in Roguelikes. TMNT: Splintered Fate has these, too, and they only made the game way less enjoyable.

Gonna stick with this game through at least the end of the story, which requires at least 1 more story quest completed first.

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 15, 2026, 07:16:21 PM »

Onto greener pastures. I know this goes against the 4 on 4 code, but I decided to go back to Oceanhorn 2 while I wait for Pragmata to drop. Of all the 3D Zelda-a-likes that have ever 3D Zelda-a-liked, this one is definitely the most.

I am also awaiting Pragmata, as well as Saros to close out the month.

Thankfully, new releases get way less interesting after April.

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 14, 2026, 10:57:30 PM »

Well, it's time now for one of the games I had always planned on playing this month, because I've been putting a fair amount of time into the Rogue Prince of Persia (PS5) now that it's out on physical media.

This game is made by the Dead Cells team, the same team making the upcoming Castlevania: Belmont's Revenge, and it is excellent. Dead Cells is one of the few Roguelikes I've ever enjoyed, as character movement is extremely snappy and progression just has a sublime flow to it. I'm happy to say that Prince of Persia made the transition over to the Dead Cells format excellently, with an added emphasis on wall running and wall climbing that wasn't really a thing in Dead Cells. People praised that Lost Crown Metroid PoP game a few years ago (and if the game hadn't bugged out on me I'd agree with the praise), but THIS just nails the speed and ease of the Prince of Persia traversal flow in a way that game just didn't.

If there's a wall in front of you or a wall in your immediate background, you can climb it for a few seconds with the press of a shoulder button, just like the Sands of Time trilogy.

In terms of design, you can tell the devs learned a lot from Hades, as there's a fair amount of story in here and it's broken up in an interesting way. While you can try to soldier through an arcade ladder-esque string of biomes to face the final boss, if you take the time to explore you'll find NPCs and little clues scattered around that point you to quests spanning the various locations, as well as clues alerting you to the existence of new locations (which adds them to future runs). Across your runs, if you string these investigations correctly, you'll unlock a major NPC and story content back in your home base. It's an interesting idea, and does some serious heavy lifting keeping new runs feeling fresh by giving the player something to work towards besides a successful run.

I don't love the combat, which basically is just Dead Cells with a fancier dodge. In a strange way, though, that feels kind of...fitting...for a Prince of Persia game. I can probably name only 1-2 games in the entire franchise where the combat was particularly amazing.

Overall, so far I'm quite enjoying this, despite not being particularly good at it. I still haven't managed to survive more than about halfway through a run.

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TalkBack / Re: Mario Galaxy Movie Has Nice Second Weekend, Takes In US$69m

« on: April 14, 2026, 04:59:50 PM »

I think economic conditions are also affecting these results. While it may not match the earnings from the first film it should be plenty profitable.

Well, that and people online aren't treating this movie with kid gloves like they did the first (mediocre) Illumination Mario movie. This is generally considered worse than the last movie, and far more blatant a commercial.

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 13, 2026, 09:19:33 PM »

Why do the costumes cost such an absurd amount? NO player will EVER buy them. Why would they when you could buy prayer beads, transcendence beads, or charms to make your camera stronger?

That always drops my rating of a game. In general, I think you should be able to buy everything in the game on a single 100% run.

The deed is done. Fatal Frame 2 Remake 100% completed.

The first and probably last time I will ever do that with a game in this series.

So did you buy all those costumes?

That's a joke, right? 

Like I said, no player will ever do that. Even after fulfilling the Platinum requirements by buying the remaining Prayer Beads I needed, I only had just under 2 million points again. Like hell I was going to grind out another 16 million points just to purchase costumes I'll probably never use while constantly being assaulted by ghosts.

This is what the encounter rate looks like on Nightmare. And, mind you, I have unlimited high power ammo in this clip. I had to do all this crap on my original Nightmare run without that.

https://x.com/i/status/2043483751980601600

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 12, 2026, 08:27:40 PM »

The deed is done. Fatal Frame 2 Remake 100% completed.

The first and probably last time I will ever do that with a game in this series.

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General Gaming / Re: 6th Annual NWR Four on Four

« on: April 11, 2026, 10:10:31 PM »

Finally, I did start up the Shantae GBC game, and I played through to Water Town. So far, I think this game absolutely sucks. Yes, it looks great for a GBC game, but so far this is a more punishing game than I expected. The game has no in-game map, areas are huge, enemy hit detection is somewhat suspect, enemies are pretty numerous, health drops are fairly rare, and items are expensive.

So I don't know where I'm going, the areas between towns never seem to end, and the entire process is going to be a battle of attrition. Great. -_-